Open Source

Pentaho Open Sources Big Data Offerings

By Adrian Bridgwater, January 31, 2012

Free Apache license for data integration tool

Pentaho has open sourced its big data offering as part of the Pentaho Kettle 4.3 release announced this week. This move sees the company move the metadata-driven Kettle Extraction Transformation Loading (ETL) engine to the Apache License, version 2.0. Given Apache's stamp on Hadoop and several of the leading NoSQL databases, Pentaho is positioning this move as a positive shift towards big data for Kettle itself.

Pentaho Kettle 4.3 will now include big data functions such as the ability to input, output, manipulate, and report on data using the following Hadoop and NoSQL stores: Cassandra, Hadoop HDFS, Hadoop MapReduce, Hadapt, HBase, Hive, HPCC Systems, and MongoDB. The product also makes available job orchestration steps for Hadoop, Amazon Elastic MapReduce, Pentaho MapReduce, HDFS File Operations, and Pig scripts.

Pentaho Kettle can execute ETL transforms outside the Hadoop cluster or within the nodes of the cluster, taking advantage of Hadoop's distributed processing and reliability. The product offers what is labeled as "at least a 10x boost in productivity" for developers through visual tools that eliminate the need to write code such as Hadoop MapReduce Java programs, Pig scripts, Hive queries, or NoSQL database queries and scripts.

According to Pentaho's product announcement, the new release makes big data platforms usable for a huge breadth of developers, whereas previously big data platforms were "usable only by the geekiest of geeks" with deep developer skills such as the ability write Java MapReduce jobs and Pig scripts.

Pentaho says that this new release provides an on-ramp to the full data discovery and visualization capabilities of Pentaho Business Analytics, including reporting, dashboards, interactive data analysis, data mining, and predictive analysis.

Dr. Dobb's encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task.
However, Dr. Dobb's moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing or spam. Dr. Dobb's further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Video

This month's Dr. Dobb's Journal

This month,
Dr. Dobb's Journal is devoted to mobile programming. We introduce you to Apple's new Swift programming language, discuss the perils of being the third-most-popular mobile platform, revisit SQLite on Android
, and much more!